VPNs for the Privacy-Passionate

Riseup is an organization that seeks to provide secure means of communication for people trying to effect social and political change. They offer a donation-based VPN service that purportedly does not log traffic and has a good reputation among privacy advocates. If you do use their VPN, I highly encourage you to donate at least 60 USD per year (the per-person cost of keeping the service up), and more if you have the means to.

FreePN is fairly new on the scene and I have only been using their network on my Ubuntu notebook for a few months. That said, it is certainly the privacy-centered project that has me most excited to see where it goes. All of their code is open-source, which means one could verify that they aren't tracking what sites you visit, although I am not sure it has received enough attention for security experts to perform thorough audits. No registration is required to use the service and it is built on an encrypted, peer-to-peer, decentralized network, arguably the gold standard architecture for privacy. As the name suggests, it is completely free to use with no data caps, bandwidth limits, speed throttling, or restricted access. The speed is good, but the GUI is still in early development and it isn't the most user-friendly option out there yet. I am hopeful that this project will get more traction and we will see additional features along with a more polished UI/UX -- I think FreePN has the potential to completely disrupt the VPN market and only time will tell if it can do so successfully.

ProtonVPN has been around for a while and has a strong reputation in part because ProtonMail has been so popular among security researchers. All of their client-side applications are open-source and well-audited. They do not have as many servers as some of the other popular VPN services, but they are well-trusted and have good speeds at a reasonable price. Additionally, ProtonVPN (and ProtonMail) are based in Switzerland which has historically maintained strong privacy laws.

I have conflicting feelings about NordVPN. On one hand, they offer a very fast service with servers all around the world for a very low price, all supposedly without logging and outside of 14 eyes. On the other hand, you almost never see them recommended in privacy guides or on privacy forums. They have a questionable reputation after failing to disclose a break of user data for several months after they found out about the breach, and they have not been as dedicated to transparency and auditing as many would like them to be. I am not sure how well-founded the concern over their business practices is, but I believe the claims of any service so popular should be approached with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Windscribe pairs a VPN with integrated ad-blocking. They have an accessible privacy policy that describes the data collected on their site and when accessing the service. They have not received too much attention in the privacy community and I have only tested it out briefly myself, but I think this is a project worth paying attention to.